Carter Dome

It poured all night but the rain slowed and gradually stopped this morning. We had leftover breakfast at the hut and then I hiked out with Chipmunk and Uke. The first climb was over Carter Dome and we somehow missed a turnoff on the way down and ended up on the wrong trail. In the Whites, we’re not just on the Appalachian Trail. The AT runs on older trails with other names and the signs don’t always mention the AT. A lot of the trail names are very similar and lead to the same places too. My guide tells me which trails I need to be on and when they switch.

I saw white blazes going off to the right at one point but the signs didn’t make any sense since we should have already been on the Carter Moriah Trail and the signs implied we had been on the Carter Dome Trail. But Chipmunk swore she’d seen some white blazes where we’d been and we couldn’t think where we would have gone wrong. We started going up the trail but soon began to suspect we were going south since the elevation profile didn’t match up. We stopped and dropped our packs and Uke went up the hill to find out while Chipmunk texted her mom to look at her tracking software and see which direction on the trail we were headed.

We heard back from both people at the same time. We had definitely come down the wrong trail and were now going the wrong way on the AT. Chipmunk and I decided to leave our packs and go back up the trail over Mount Hight to get the portion of the AT we missed since we are purists. It didn’t take too long but it did add two to three miles to our day. Oops.

The weather was a little chilly all day, with mist and light rain occasionally. We went over Middle Carter Mountain just fine but coming down North Carter Mountain, there was a very steep section that involved more rock slabs than rock steps. We went very slowly since it was slick. Fifteen had joined us a couple of miles before when he took a spill and rolled about fifteen feet down a rock slab. He landed right at my feet and hit hard. He was stunned for a few minutes but turned out to only have some scrapes. I got his pack off while Uke dug out his first aid kit and we cleaned up his face and hands and knees. His glasses had broken so I bent and duct taped them back into shape, and one of his trekking poles had broken but he actually had a spare.

We all went even more slowly after that and decided to stop at the Imp Shelter instead of going all the way into town. It was cold so we were all in our sleeping bags early, as soon as dinner was done. Chipmunk read aloud to us from her book for a while and Uke brought up some youtube videos on his phone to pass some time before sleeping. Only 6.9 miles today, not including our detour.